Can Glancing Blows to Nuclei by Neutrinos Summon Particles From the Quantum Foam?

In what they call a “weird little corner” of the already weird world of neutrinos, physicists have found evidence that these tiny particles might be involved in a surprising reaction.

Neutrinos are famous for almost never interacting. As an example, ten trillion neutrinos pass through your hand every second, and fewer than one actually interacts with any of the atoms that make up your hand. However, when neutrinos do interact with another particle, it happens at very close distances and involves a high-momentum transfer.

And yet a new paper, published in Physical Review Letters this week, shows that neutrinos sometimes can also interact with a nucleus but leave it basically untouched – inflicting no more than a “glancing blow” – resulting in a particle being created out of a vacuum.

link.

China Majorly Upgrading China Jinping Underground Laboratory

For certain physics experiments, deeper is better. Since it opened in 2010, the China Jinping Underground Laboratory (CJPL)—in a hollowed-out cavern along a tunnel in Sichuan province—has been the world's deepest underground laboratory. Two thousand four hundred meters of rock have shielded its experimental chambers from background radiation that might mask the extremely subtle traces of dark matter, the universe's postulated missing mass. CJPL's observational capabilities were limited by its mere 4000-cubic-meter size. It is about to grow to 120,000 cubic meters, making it the world's second largest underground lab and positioning it to make breakthrough contributions to fundamental investigations into dark matter, neutrinos, and conditions in the early universe.

link.